Wine pairings: Two wine gurus take our questions

Grape insight from the Red Velvet Wine Bar and Market Restaurant guys

Some evoke the kind of imagery you'd expect in a good Updike short story. ("Peach cobbler, nutmeg, macadamia nut, spearmint, bees wax, rubber" - a description of a Riesling Kabinett at Red Velvet Wine Bar.) Because wines are complex.

A: Artichoke. There’s a chemical compound in there that tends to make anything after it taste sweet. It’ll make an Alsace or German Riesling that’s got all that sugar in it taste like Smucker's Fruit Juice.

Q: Big wine region on the horizon?

A: Greece is kind of a somm’s favorite pick for an up-and-coming region. There’s this real renaissance going on with grape producers. And they’re doing it more on indigenous varietals rather than ripping up all these amazing old vineyards and replanting more international varietals like Cabernet and Chardonnay and Pinot Noir that have more mass commercial appeal. One varietal (there) is Assyrtiko, mainly grown on the island of Santorini. It’s just this amazing aromatic varietal, one of the few varietals for whites that can be both medium-plus to high alcohol and also medium-plus to high acidity. You don’t find that too much.

Q: No. 1 rule you apply when pairing wines with food?

A: The first rule that I always tell people in terms of matching a food to a wine, is (match) the weight of the dish to the weight of the wine. (Like) milk (goes) from skim to 1 percent to 2 percent to whole. I try to match that to what my perception is of the weight of the dish.

Q: Why did you pursue wine?

A: At most of the restaurants I’d worked at I was the go-to server if anyone had any questions about wine. When I was a night server at A.R. Valentien I was saving money and I was gonna explore the wine-growing regions of Australia...

Q: What did you do in Australia?

A: It depends on who you ask. If you ask me I say, "Studying and traveling wine regions." If you ask my mom, she says, "Drinking." ... I didn’t take the first-level sommelier exam until 2003.

A: I've always had a fixation with taste and smell. I also enjoy geography, history, anthropology, which are often important when trying to understand wine at an academic level...I'm self taught. Learned by reading a lot and tasting as much as possible.

A: Not really. I've tasted some good Baja wines but the way they are priced due to the costs of export, make them a hard sell. I'd love to support local wineries, but I'm not confident that Temecula wines have reached a level of quality nor are stylistically appropriate for the wine program at Red Velvet.

Q: No. 1 rule you apply when pairing wines with food?

A: I'm pretty sure I'm stealing this idiom from someone else but, "if it grows together, it goes together." When this doesn't work, it's all about finding a balance between the flavors/textures in the dish and those in a wine.

Q: What other wine work have you done?

A: This is kinda my entry gig into the industry. It's a lot of work and a lot of pressure, but it's been (nice) to have such a good response.